From my blog at CynicalOfSociety.com:
I know quite a few people who believe that we should consult God (or Jesus) with every decision we make. And after we make that decision, we have to thank them. They can’t make a move without asking God what to do. Should I get married – let’s ask God. Should I get a new job – let’s ask God. Do I want fries with that – let’s ask God. I’m sure God is getting pretty sick of the trivial crap you’re bothering him with throughout the day.
What these people believe is that we should devote 100% of our lives to thanking, praising, and worshiping. But this begs the question – Did God create mankind so that we would simply sit around all day praising him? That sounds incredibly egotistical and self-centered for an omnipotent being to create an entire species whose only duty is to worship him. And I don’t believe that’s why man was created. You can let God guide you and you can give thanks, but if that’s all we’re supposed to do in life then that’s not much of a life to begin with. You can be a good person, which is what the Biblical version of Jesus told us to do, without having to praise him 24/7.
If you present this argument about the egotistical God to a religious zealot, they will inevitably quote you some scripture “proving” that they are right. Fine, you can quote scriptures, but you have to take into account that these stories were only first written down around 1,000 B.C., and neither the old or new Testaments were translated to English until the 1300′s. The first new Testament wasn’t even written down until the 600′s, so for more than 600 years after the death of Jesus, these stories were passed on verbally, and you can’t honestly say that the stories didn’t get twisted during those 600 years before they written down. And since the original versions of both were written in either Aramaic or Latin, there was no proper way to translate them to any other language, because neither of those can be translated with 100% accuracy. Did you ever play a game of telephone when you were younger? By the time an original phrase – let’s say “I can jump over the school” – reaches the end of the line, it becomes something like “Flies know how to use tools.” That’s pretty much what happened with the Bible, except these stories had hundreds and hundreds of years for the storytellers and writers to change them around all they wanted.
Full post is here -
http://cynicalofsociety.com/2011/07/a-leap-of-faith/